The Colonel's Table: Session One

It was about 9:00 PM at the Wenatchee combination KFC/A&W on the interstate. In attendance: 

• Thad Albright, juvenile delinquent, working the fryer
• Laine Kornell, elderly bombe addict, at the drive through
• Whistle Jack, working homeless, on the register

They were supposed to have backup but they were alone for the night. Nadia, the gun-toting Maoist who usually explained what they were supposed to do for the conspiracy, left a rack of chicken fresh out of the tophet (which the Coterie insisted on calling the pressure fryer) with a sticky note:

 

SERVE THESE

CHOOSE WISELY

 

The first customer was a nurse in a lemon yellow Toyota. She asked at the window if Mick was in and Laine said he was on vacation. The nurse asked if he was actually on vacation or if that was a euphemism for him being dead. Laine said he was in Mexico, which disappointed her. She was hoping to cop off him. Thad packed one of the chicken burgers from the special order rack into a sandwich for the customer. She paused before driving away to inspect the burger, seemed satisfied and drove away. Laine leaned out the window to shout obscenities at her and noticed her little sedan left track marks on the pavement like a tank.

 

The next group of customers parked and came into the restaurant to eat: two carloads of clean cut male twenty and thirtysomethings in polos or white dress shirts tucked into business pants. All of them open carried firearms, pistols or long guns on slings. They queued, ordered from Jack without incident and sat down to wait for their food. Enough of them ordered chicken that they probably weren't Seventh Day Adventists. Mormons maybe, or Grace Church from up on the north side of the city. Thad only gave the group a single special order.

The religious types sat to eat and discussed bowling and recent deaths among the city's elderly retirees. One bit down on something hard. He reached into his chicken and pulled out a rifle bullet, deformed like a cartoon gold coin where his teeth had dented the soft lead tip. The others peered at the unfired cartridge, not upset or afraid but considering the matter seriously. How did it get inside? There weren't any holes in the breading where it could have been inserted. If it had been fried like that it would have detonated in the pressure cooker.

 

 

Jack accepted this event with equanimity. He was accustomed to the supernatural and the bullet probably entered the meat through quantum stochastic ooze. Thad started yelling at the customers when they came up to the counter to ask for a replacement. He wasn't ready for the possibility of foreign objects spontaneously generating in food and assumed it was a prank. Cooler heads prevailed and he dished out a replacement special order, interested to see what happened next.

 

The guy with the bullet burger sat down to eat his substitute. He opened the sandwich and probed it like a prison guard checking a cake for hidden items. He took a tentative bite, then another, then finished the whole thing. The group ate the rest of their meal without incident but when the guy stood to leave, his gunbelt slipped down his trousers and his enormous wheelgun fell out of his holster. On contact with the ground it spontaneously disassembled itself, not just cylinder and grips but springs and lockwork firing out of the weapon to scatter the parts across the floor. 

 

The churchgoers considered the matter gravely and asked for a broom to retrieve the screws from under the drink machine. There was no way they could reasonably blame this on the KFC employees. Jack stuck the broom under the machine himself to retrieve the missing parts. Mick Redhook, the big fat ex-military dude one rank above them in the conspiracy, was a fanatic about keeping the restaurant clean, and the metal parts emerged free of chicken grease.

 

While all that was going down, Laine got another order at the drive through. The speaker had a deep, watery voice. When they came up to the window they didn't have a car but were so tall they had to crouch to see inside. An enormous elephant-man type figure with bad skin and strange growths everywhere. They reached with an enormous hand and carefully manicured nails for their food, holding bills and a fistful of coins delicately in the other. When they saw that Laine had dressed himself in a full panoply of cardboard chicken buckets, the strange troll-man angrily refused the food he just ordered. If he wanted to deal with this shit, he'd go across the river to the dicks in East Wenatchee. He threw the coins through the window and stomped off.

 

 

 

Three elderly Latino men came into the dining room, clad in flannels, mustaches and big vaquero hats and shepherding an excited pair of grandkids. The abuelos ate sparingly. Thad packed one of them a boosted box of chicken fries from the special orders rack. The kids got root beer floats and made a big mess with the ice cream.The old dude who ate the chicken fries tossed a coin. He kept tossing it, squinted and showed the others. They didn't believe whatever he told them, then looked closer and were astonished by whatever they saw as he kept tossing it. Whistle Jack's Spanish wasn't good enough to follow the discussion. Soon enough the old guys and the kids finished. One dude got up to piss while the others went outside to pull the car around.

 

Another car pulled into the parking lot. A red volvo which disgorged

• A smartly dressed woman with a loose but well fitted business suit, cigar and metal teeth.
• A man with excellent posture, a slight limp and a corset worn under his clothes.

The lady stopped to talk with the old guys outside. She said something to them in Spanish, lit her cheap cigar off one of their cigarettes and allowed the guy a puff before entering the store, still smoking. She came up to the counter and Jack immediately told her she couldn't smoke in the restaurant. She grinned with her big Jaws type teeth and resisted the urge to mash it out on the counter. Instead she blew it out, tucked it in her breast pocket and asked to see Nadia. She spoke carefully to suppress the Andre the Giant inflection from her steel dentures. Jack told her Nadia was gone for the night and asked who it was that wanted to see her. It was Alice, the smoker replied. Alice Alcazar. The man with her smiled blandly at Jack like he was taking too long in line at the grocery store and put a hand on Alice's shoulder. Jack asked why she went with the steel teeth over plastic or ceramic. By way of explanation Alice bit the end off a cheap Floridita and spat it expertly into the garbage can. The big lady lit it as she left the restaurant and Jack swore she just sparked a flame with the tip of her finger to do so.

One of the elderly Mexicans came back inside to bang on the door of the bathroom. Did they need to call the plumber? AAA for a tow? He joked but he was clearly worried his friend had a heart attack or something in there. Especially when the guy didn't respond. Thad grabbed the narcan, came out with the master key to the barthroom and unlocked it to check on the guy. Instead of a fast food men's room he found a flat plain of compacted regolith, lit by a pitiless red sun that illuminated a row of structures in the distance. He immediately returned to the kitchen, distressed by the apparition of an evil portal in the restaurant. The Mexican guy straightened his cowboy hat and ventured forth through the door to find his missing friend. Whiskey Jack couldn't leave the register unattended but Laine had no such compunctions. He taped his cardboard armor to make an improvised HAZMAT suit, loaded tools and cleaning supplies into the mop bucket cart and set off into the otherspace to find the lost customer and his mysterious coin.

 

 

The hard baked ground crunched under Laine's feet. Two sets of bootprints led him from the door (mounted to a stone outbuilding) across the bled to a little hacienda with adobe and concrete structures. A handful of sad little cacti subsisted on what little moisture remained in the desiccated realm. Through the columned portico to the largest structure. Inside was a gallery. Corpses laid out in various states of preservation. One in a tank of methyl alcohol, one vulcanized in a bell jar, one mummified, one a flutter of identical butterflies pinned to a display board. The Mexican cowboy who entered to find his friend briefly regarded the display, noted that Laine had entered the room, said something in Spanish then resumed the search for his missing friend, shouting the man's name as he left the room.

 

Laine inspected the corpses. The mummy's eyes were perfectly preserved, the only wet thing in the dry room. They followed him as he moved. The apparently living corpse sent a wave of boiling panic through the elderly drug addict. He surged forward and crammed his fingers into the eyesockets, destroying the eyes and gouging the dusty and quite-dead brain behind them. 

 

Back in the restaurant, the two grandkids excitedly ran off in pursuit of something that disappeared around the side of the restaurant. The elderly Latin dude caught one but couldn't keep up with the other. Thad exited the building through the back door to make sure she didn't come to harm. The kid ran down the sidewalk in pursuit of a figure in a plague doctor outfit, with black robes and a beak shaped mask. The thing stopped and turned to impassively regard the approaching child. In the streetlights and the light of the passing cars reflected off the sidewalk Thad saw that the robe was actually a curtain of hair. The cane tapping the ground was an antenna. Beneath the robe the thing had more than two feet.

 

SteveMobCannon

 

He didn't freak out. Not this time. He caught up, scooped up the child and ran the other way, back to the restaurant. Abuelo number three caught up with him, correctly assessed the situation (Thad relocating the child away from a threatening stranger) and advanced on the "doctor", shouting obscenities in Spanish. The old man got close enough to touch and the "mask" lashed out to stab him. The cloak of hair billowed and Thad saw that the face was actually a stinger on the back of a huge scorpion.

 

While all this was happening, Whistle Jack took the opportunity to devour a fried chicken breast from the Special Orders rack. He understood the connection between the special orders and the supernatural phenomena throughout the night. The nurse, the religious dude and the old guy with the coin had all eaten special orders before they experienced the strange phenomena. He spat the last chicken bone into the garbage can and it sizzled like meat frying in hot grease. Concerned, he took the lid off the bin and found the bone transmuted to a sword, hilt protruding from still-bubbling fat that somehow didn't melt the plastic trash bag. The sword burned him when he picked it up. The pain went straight up his spine, then down again.

 

On the other side of the portal, Laine opened the huge jar holding the dead woman and peeled the pickled skin off the corpse. The seam of her jaw ran all the way down the side of her body, bristling with teeth like a crocodile. A man screamed and she followed the sound, dripping with mummy slime and methanol. In a mausoleum at the edge of the property, the cowboy crouched over his missing friend. The old guy lay on the ground with a wooden spike through his thigh, attached to a pole which had whipped forward under tension and impaled him. The pole was supple enough to bend and spring back, it couldn't have been made from the dried out wooden furniture in the hacienda. Someone planted it recently. Together with the withered vaquero, Laine removed the pole from the gap in the stones where it was wedged. He used the tools in the mop bucket to saw through the wood, leaving the spike in the guy's leg rather than remove it and risk him bleeding out. The wounded man mumbled. A tile fell off the sloped roof of the building and shattered behind them, but when Laine whirled around there was nothing up there. Together they dragged the injured guy back across the plain to the door where they came in.

 

The door was booby trapped. A hand grenade on a tripwire. They dragged the wounded guy to the other side of the stone structure and Laine used the mop to knock the grenade free into the bucket from around the corner. It exploded harmlessly and allowed him to open the door. To a stone wall.

 

Laine clucked like a rooster, enraged. He rammed his bucketed head into the stone like a chicken pecking at the rock. The cowboy shouted and pointed back at the estate. In the dim light of the red sun, two figures cast long shadows across the plain. Too far to see, just a human silhouette and a small animal.

 

ibid

Whistle Jack left the restaurant with the sword. It spoke to him in a voice he recognized, though he'd never heard the Colonel speak. Never heard a recording. The plague bug stood atop the paralyzed man so the hair covered them both. It made a sound like a slicer at a deli cutting meat into wafer thin layers. Jack missed with the first swing. The beast kept feeding, like a bald eagle ignoring a crow trying to steal its fish. His second swing took the stinger off and gave him an opening to kill it. Beneath the monster, the elderly Mexican looked like someone had slashed his face repeatedly with a razor, gouging out one eye. But he was still alive. Jack put the old guy in the recovery position and began shaving the hair off the dead monster.

While this was happening, Thad kept the old guy's two grandkids from running out to their insensate relative and called an ambulance for the old man "having a heart attack". He was interrupted by a bunch of high schoolers banging on the door, who he quickly let into the restaurant before they too could become scorpion food. They filmed the monster battle outside and repeatedly asked for a number six and a number seven. When that failed to produce a groan of recognition they each asked for a bucket of chicken (except one who asked for the KFC equivalent of a happy meal). When it became clear that this too was hazing (when he rang up the order) he bid them down to a single bucket split between the whole group.

 

On the other side of the portal, Laine went looking for another way out. He returned to the Hacienda in hopes of cornering the strange figure, who seemed to know what was going on. They outran him easily and by the time he reentered the gallery the only sign was two sets of tracks: bootprints and the paws of a small animal. A sound like a flipping coin drew his attention to a hallway where an amber light briefly shone, distinct from the red sun. Rather than run into another trap, Laine knocked the jug of methylated spirits on its side and used one of his buckets to drink from it. The wood alcohol blinded him around the same time as the pickled monster-woman in the now empty jar woke up. She was also blind and went snuffling around at ankle level trying to bite him. Blind and hunted by a strange monster, the elderly drug addict freaked out and ran through a random door. Something swung down and hit him, knocking him to the floor and stunning him.

Blind and incapacitated, Laine heard footsteps. A little voice urging someone to kill him. Take his stuff. Kill him now. Someone pulled the bucket off his head. Dragged him by his hair. He heard shouting and curses in Spanish. Felt the red sun on his face. Then the old Mexican guy lifted him to his feet. Told him a woman with a little animal brought Laine outside and left him there. Told him he had a way out. 

Laine heard him toss a coin.

 

Mick Redhook pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant, drifting just a little before coming to a halt and climbing out alongside Nadia Gage. The duo took control of the situation, draping a tarp over the shaved corpse of the giant scorpion before the EMTs could see it. The old Latin cowboy emerged from the bathroom with Laine and deposited him next to his still-breathing but unconscious friends, one stabbed in the thigh and one missing an eye, before hugging the two frightened grandkids. The medics looked over the injured men while Mick explained the situation. Some kind of animal attack. Nadia fussed over Laine, cleaning his hands and promising to save his eyes even if the wood alcohol irreversibly damaged them. There was a guy up in Maine who did good work, although technically as a new employee Laine didn't have any paid sick days yet. She obviously felt guilty for leaving the trio unattended, though at least two of them were older than her. 

 

The ambo left with the injured men and the truck following them with the survivor and kids. Nadia chased the high schoolers out when they didn't buy anything. Mick had bad news for the trio of frycooks. They had passed the test. They were ready to join the Colonel's Secret Coterie as fully initiated burger warriors.